68 INDUSTRY

The Gale Industries Thesaurus is a subset of the master Gale Business Thesaurus in the narrower domain of distinct groups of productive or profit-making industries, enterprises, companies, and firms. This includes terms such as advertising agencies, airlines, automobile industry, clothing stores, drugstores, electric utilities, engineering services, health clubs, law firms, petroleum industry, supermarkets, and weapons industry. All thesaural relationships (BT/NT, RT, USE/UF) are included, and some terms have scope notes.

"In 1999, MSCI and S&P Global developed the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS), seeking to offer an efficient investment tool to capture the breadth, depth and evolution of industry sectors. GICS is a four-tiered, hierarchical industry classification system. It consists of 11 sectors, 24 industry groups, 68 industries and 157 sub-industries. Companies are classified quantitatively and qualitatively. Each company is assigned a single GICS classification at the sub-industry level according to its principal business activity.